Category Archives: MOOC

Susan Bauer-Wu is another Western Buddhist who ran a meditation workshop section in the Coursera MOOC Introduction to Tibetan Buddhism ….. She trained as a nurse, moved into academia, became involved in the Mind & Life conferences founded by Varela and Engle with the Dalai Lama as Honorary Chairman and is now President of the Mind & Life Institute. Prior to that she was the director of the Compassionate Care Initiative and the Tussi and John Kluge Professor in Contemplative End-of-Life Care at the University of Virginia (UVa) School of Nursing and associate faculty in the UVa Department of Religious Studies and on the executive committee of the pan-university UVa Contemplative Sciences Center.

I really appreciated her contribution to the course. In fact it was the meditation workshops and the neuroscience worships that kept me interested in the course. The formal lectures introducing Tibetan Buddhism were incredibly stilted and pedagogical. Such a missed opportunity. Here are some of her led reflections. You can find more on YouTube or you can have a look at the MOOC material on the link above.

The reflection that I most appreciate is the one on stepping out of out thinking minds. But they are all very good, very simply done, and if you’re new to meditation listen to them all.

Grounding Yourself:

” Not trying to make the experience a certain way, but it is just as it is, and see what you notice…Just being curious, but not analysing…. with the breath as an anchor, in this moment…”

~~~~~~~~~

Stabilising the Mind:

“As long as you are alive, your breath is with you…. simply noticing the sensations of breathing in and breathing out ….. the texture of the breath…any time the mind wanders, and it will, very, very gently, very simply, coming back to the physical experience… “

~~~~~~

Stepping Out of Our Thinking Minds:

“This practice is of choice-less awareness… and it’s a non-conceptual being with and knowing…an opportunity to go beyond the personal pronouns of I and me and mine…. beyond self-interests and self-centredness and contracting around thoughts, or events….awareness of all sensations …. and allow the field to expand further to include thought-streams, images, memories… without separation of it rest in this awareness in this moment.”

This was a course run jointly by the Philosophy, Astronomy and Cognitive Science Departments at Edinburgh University. The philosophers took part in all of it. In the first half they linked with astronomers and in the second half with people researching in consciousness and what it is, and interested in developing machine intelligence. It was pretty tough going especially the first half! But I really enjoyed it. It’s on Coursera and you can find the course syllabus here. This is a brief intro…. Click the arrow to start.

As in most MOOCs, there comes a point where you’re faced with a project to submit. There were actually two projects in this course, one on the astronomy input and one on the consciousness / intelligence lectures. I went from being annoyed that I had to write one to being annoyed, after i got going, that I was limited to 750 words! Here are mine:

In what way can philosophy or philosophical thinking contribute to the physical sciences?

In the Past: Scientists and philosophers are curious about the world around them and there have been many helpful interactions between these two fields of thought over the centuries. In the mid-1600s, the Royal Society, a group natural philosophers, began discussing the new philosophy of promoting knowledge of the natural world through observation and experiment, and Locke, a Royal Society Fellow, expanded on empirical philosophy. In 1700s, David Hume threw philosophical light on causality and the judgement of probability. These ideas became central to scientific method. Many philosophers have themselves been mathematicians, engineers, physicists: Descartes, Liebniz, Pascal, Wittgenstein, Russell, Popper.1

What of today’s philosophers? In the field of ethics, philosophers have a great deal to contribute directly to science by asking ethical questions about the direction of scientific research: work on nuclear weapons; embryo research; genetic modification.

Philosophers can also help the sciences indirectly by tackling science-deniers, especially climate science deniers. People who deny science bring their own vested interests into their questions. They make statements but they are closed and biassed in their approach. They pick and choose those facts that suit their ideological agenda. Scientists can of course answer biassed questions and show up any mistaken premises. However science denial, though a relatively recent phenomena, is already powerful enough to harm our wider society. Philosophers could aid not just science but all areas of enquiry by educating people about how to ask open and unbiassed questions of both scientists and science-deniers and how to evaluate their answers.

What of today’s scientists? Historically maths and science were thought to yield an especially safe and certain kind of knowledge and philosophers have examined and helped clarify that belief. But do today’s scientists need any help in evaluating what, how and if they know what they think they know?

Technology enables cosmologists to see ‘back in time’ as well to see into space. Observations of distant regions of space provide external evidence which tests assumptions about uniformity and must help diminish possible anthropic bias. Exploration of our solar system and beyond provides added evidence for our current cosmological theories.

Perhaps the job of philosophy of science has been done?

Falsification: Popper’s contribution on falsification is immensely important. No doubt that scientists already appreciated and practised the basic empirical approach that he defined, but falsification is a powerful methodological tool and definition was needed. Conversely scientists are right to be cautious in accepting the falsity of any body of well-tested evidence. The recent report 2 from OPERA team which seemed to require faster-than-light neutrino motion is a good example of this. Some months later, Special Relativity remains unfalsified and OPERA team are getting themselves a new clock!

The Anthropic Principle (AP) Carter, an astronomer, first formulated it. Barrow and Tipler 3, mathematician and physicist, have expanded it. Their FAP (F for Final) reads:

“Intelligent, information processing must come into evidence in the Universe, and, once it comes into existence, it will never die out.”

This could easily be taken as a teleological argument based on perceived evidence of deliberate design in the natural or physical world. 4 The authors of AP may not themselves advocate an intelligent creator of the Universe, but their argument can be misused for that end. Bostrom 5, who is a philosopher, takes Barrow and Tipler to task saying that their FAP is in fact antithetical to the original conception of AP.

Bostrom collaborates with scientists on anthropic bias when estimating various catastrophic events. His 2010 paper 6 on Anthropic Shadow is a good practical example of current philosophical thinking clarifying the interpretation of data on near-Earth Object Impacts, Volcanism and Supernovae frequencies.

Conclusion: Philosophical thinking continues to contribute to the physical sciences. However some of that thinking is carried out by scientists themselves, and only some by philosophers. The scope of modern technology offers an alternative kind of approach to clarifying and testing scientific assumptions.

However Aristotle, often called the first scientist, is still not far off the mark when he tells us ….. “Begin by setting down the appearances and then work through the puzzles that these present us with.”

Feedback on the above! Three other people on the course assessed my essay. They followed a marking rubric set out by the course lecturers. Out of a possible score of 21, I got 19 🙂 These are their general remarks:

peer 1 → It gives a clear description of the relation between philosophy and science. Except for giving examples of the relevant lecture material, it quotes books and other information which enrich the content. However, instead of explaining how philosophy or philosophical thinking contributes to the physical sciences, it talks mostly about whether philosophy or philosophical thinking still contributes to the physical sciences.

peer 2 → Well argued with reference to the material. However, expected a deeper grasp of the fundamental philosophical issues impacting science.

peer 3 → very well structured and elaborated. The arguments continue logically and cumulatively. There are a lot of arguments that support the idea of how can philosophical thinking contribute to the physical sciences. It might have been best to focus on just one of them. But otherwise, a good overview is fine enough for me too !

In what way can cognitive science inform issues in the philosophy of mind?

Introduction:
The hard problem of phenomenal consciousness and qualia is intriguing: can we study scientifically what is completely subjective? can we ascribe precise physical causation to subjective experience? will we ever be able to bridge the gap between external and internal experience?

Phenomenal-consciousness is experiential, associated with incoming sense data; the total experiential content of an event answers “what is it like”. Experiences of grass, cucumber, limes all share the experiential quality (quale) of greenishness but not the qualia of sourness or sweetness. The external experience is quantifiable. The internal experience is not so quantifiable and sometimes it’s mysterious. (References 1-3)

Moreover not everyone experiences the same event in the same way: no way am I going to pick up a worm. My worm qualia = yeuch. But I’m married to someone whose worm qualia = “wow, he’s cute”. The worm event clearly isn’t reproducible in terms of qualia produced.

Since the same experience can produce such very different qualia, the qualia can’t be a quality of the actual experience alone. There must be something extra involved, presumably an internal quality of individual minds.

Quantifying qualia: When the basic experiment isn’t generally reproducible can cognitive science really help out? But…. experiences are reproducible in the sense that groups of individuals will respond with yeuch and groups with wow. So it’s possible to study groups of individuals and compare and contrast the results. It would also be useful in ascribing cause and effect to observe a range of qualia over a range of related experiences and analyse the emerging patterns, both of reported qualia and associated imaging results.

But however interesting all that is, it still leaves the hard problem: if scientists knew all the workings of the brain, that still wouldn’t tell us why and how a particular experience produces a particular subjective feeling or indeed any subjective feeling at all. (Reference 3)

Even if this problem is true as stated, does it matter?
In weeks 3-4 of this course, cosmologists acknowledged that ideas like inflation, multiverses are in principle unobservable directly. Philosophers asked is it really science when you can’t match theory with observation? Cosmologists responded with an example: although noone is going to go to centre of sun and measure its temperature, none doubts its predicted value of 15million degrees because it comes from physics tested and validated many times over in other contexts.

In other words, science always has some limitations but with confidence in the theoretical framework we can trust inferred conclusions.

How might this help philosophy of the mind?
It is always necessary to consider any underdetermination of a theory and this is in essence the problem of the hard problem. However the wider scientific context for studies of mind and consciousness includes : biology, neurophysics, general evolutionary theory, robotics, artificial intelligence.… If new studies of the physical mind produce results which are consistent with this wider theoretical context, then they deserve weighty consideration, in the same way as cosmologists give weight to theories of dark matter, dark energy and inflation though they not directly observable. Yet. Yet is an important qualifier… further study may well provide the breakthrough or at least give important hints about what the answer to the hard problem might look like.

Bayesian theorem too can help turn prior belief into a probability which can be quantified and developed as more information is acquired. It’s relevant to both cosmology and theories of mind. Since the mind problem involves uncertainty, Bayesian analysis should be able to help significantly especially since computing algorithms can cope with very complex statistics. (ref 4) Bayesian analysis can help measure whether any learning is going on in a mind. It can quantify the likelihood that physical causation is at work rather than merely correlation.

Much thought is given by scientists to the problem of distinguishing between correlation and causation.. This also lies at the heart of the hard problem. Science says: approach it pragmatically and here’s the sort of thing that will help….Ref 5 has a handy list!

Conclusion: Utilising the help available from cognitive science has and will surely continue to help philosophers deepen their understanding of the mind. The experiential gap may not be as hard a problem as it is portrayed. The complexity of the brain is a hugely hard problem to crack. Maybe harder than the hard problem itself. I would bet that the more advances made by cognitive scientists, the less hard the philosophical hard problem will appear.Bibliography

Feedback on the above. This included writing feedback from oneself. I think the score on this essay was 16/21.

self → I decided to focus on one aspect of the course – phenomenal consciousness, qualia and the hard problem. I found this a helpful way to deepen my understanding of this problem. I am aware that in doing this, I’ve omitted referring directly to various other ways in which cognitive science addresses the philosophy of the mind. However I have brought in aspects from the first half of the course that I think are relevant to this question.

peer 1 → Using subheading with such a short word-count could be avoided even though it provides some clarity to the reader. A formal essay structure would be more appropriate. Even though references rules were not exactly specified by the tutors, an academic reference structure or using an academic reference system/method (e.g. Harvard. Vancouver, APA) would be more appropriate. Most of the arguments do not address the question being asked. The student abruptly introduces the topic by providing an example: ‘’the hard problem of phenomenal consciousness’’ which is somewhat misleadingly presented as the main topic. This continues through the rest of the assignment. Some examples have been used, however they are not included in the lecture material, while the supportive arguments are not as coherent. This probably indicates not clear understanding of the lecture material or the assessment instructions. Moreover cosmology is not relevant to the topic as it is not a cognitive science. Similarly, discussing the ‘‘underdetermination theory’’ appears irrelevant to the topic .A number of helpful references have been used, however it would be more appropriate to use an original peer-reviewed source instead of Wikipedia which is a public secondary source.

peer 2 → The organizational structure of the essay is very logical, describing phenomenology’s problems and how cognitive science can address that. However, the essay is very disorganized, lacks an explicit thesis, and full of broken sentences that obscures your point somewhat.

peer 3 → Nice connection with the first part of the course. Good realization that although answers seem hard, we can expect to see them get easier. The connection between genetics and embryology required that molecular biology be invented first. Neuroscience has a long way to go, but we shouldn’t despair.

peer 4 → Excellent essay. You show good comprehension of the material and the problems arising from it. You show enthusiasm and imagination. To me, some of the threads seemed not to apply directly to the hard problem. If I were more pedantically inclined, I’d comment on sentence fragments and such.

This course is a cracker! (Scots for ‘wonderful’) I did this MOOC course earlier in the year. I thought it was time that I understood climate denial better and hopefully become more able to debunk it. I mean shouting at the TV brings some personal satisfaction but doesn’t help the overall situation. I’m not bad at recognising when inaccurate information is being portrayed as the truth. But I wasn’t good enough at recognising what exactly was going on and how to communicate that to other folk. Continue reading Climate Denial 101 MOOC→

freely accessible courses, that’s right there is no charge to take the course 🙂

on almost anything you might be interested in 🙂

run by Universities from all over the world, some of them very prestigious 🙂

usually set at a level for someone new to the subject 🙂

they repeat the courses from time to time, so you can repeat or catch up if you didn’t finish first time round 🙂

you just need a broadband connection and off you go 🙂

I discovered these a few years back when I was trying to become a bit better informed about current thinking on climate change. There are various websites where you can access the courses. I’ve used Coursera and edX. Both are excellent.

Over four or so years, I’ve completed quite a few courses. Use the MOOC tab above to see some of the courses I’ve done and in some case see the essays and projects that I’ve handed in for course-work. Oh yeah, it’s serious you know! OK, you don’t need to do the course-work. You can flit in and out of the course content as you please. Oh come on….

How do you join in a MOOC?

Well, you register with the site.

Find a course you’re interested in. Sometimes there will be an introductory video to view just to get a sense of what’s involved. Mostly you’ll also see an outline of what’s in the course. Sometimes you have to sign up for the course to look at the course content, but if you sign up and then decide it’s not for you, no worries.

Once you’ve signed, you’ll get an email telling you when the course is about to begin. I’ve noticed that Coursera also send you an encouraging little nudge if you’ve signed up but not shown up!

Then what happens?

Each week, there are a set of videos to watch. Usually takes a couple of hours to do that, all at once or spread over as long as you like. Here’s one from a MOOC about the Economics of Sustainable Development run by Prof Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia Univeristy who is also Special Advisor to Ban-ki-moon, the UN General Secretary.

There’s usually a bit of extra reading you can do, if you want, in the form of weblinks to go to and sometimes as downloadable PDFs. Some courses have a course book, sometimes it’s available to dowload for free. Or you can buy it. So over the whole course you build up a reading list on the subject.

Each week there is also a quiz based on what was in that week’s videos and a date by which you have to do the quiz, usually a couple of weeks ahead. You can see what you’ve got correct and what you’ve got wrong once you’ve tried the quiz and since you always have multiple attempts to redo it, you can go back and try for a better score. It’s useful to do the quiz to find out how much you’ve taken in of the material. Usually the mark you get in the quiz counts towards passing the course.

At the end of the course, there is sometimes a course essay or project. So by essay they mean about 750 words. Really that’s not a lot! There’s already nearly 700 words just in this post. Or it might be more of a project where you do a bit of reasearch, use photos to make a collage, or make a video from photos…. I’ve got to be a dab hand with IMovie software!

Well I guess it is being back at school. But you are an adult, aren’t you? It’s you’re own choice to be there and go back for the next week’s videos. If you don’t turn up, noone is going to get the school secretary to phone your parents!

But how else could you find yourself being taught about International Development by the UN’s Special Advisor on Sustainable Development? Or be led through the basics of dark energy and dark matter by an Edinburgh astronomy professor? I could go on…. the subjects you’re interested in are waiting to be explored.

This is the essay I wrote for a course assessment. It follows the argument layout that people have found works best when trying to explain examples of climate change denial which is :

The point here is that the fact takes pride of place. It’s the first thing that the reader takes in. A bad debunking does it the other way round. It’s sort of understandable. You say what’s wrong and proceed to say why… but it doesn’t work, the myth gets pride of place, is remembered, while the debunk gets forgotten. As in…

Anyway, here’s my debunk attempt …..

It’s a fact that different parts of the world are being and will be affected differently by global warming. Different kinds of evidence – e.g. sea level; ocean, land and air temperatures; icecap melting; precipitation; biodiversity changes – all contribute to the emerging climate change consilience indicating that urgent action is needed now to keep average global warming to around 2 degrees. Some effects may be beneficial, at least in the short term. But the overall global effects will make the world a much harder place for its many species, including human beings, to survive.

Yet there is a myth that global warming is nothing to be alarmed about. For example, in 2013, the UK Environment Secretary, Owen Patterson, said that “There are advantages to global warming.…I think we should just accept that the climate has been changing for centuries. ….The IPCC latest report shows a really quite modest increase, half of which has already happened. They are talking one to two and a half degrees…. what it is saying is something we can adapt to over time, and we are very good as a race at adapting.” (ref1)

Mr Patterson is correct is saying there are some advantages to global warming and in UK we may see crop yield increases as temperatures warm; growing seasons may lengthen and extend further north. However it is also true that increased sea level combined with tidal surges and changing precipitation patterns will endanger our UK coasts and cities. Indeed in 2013/14, large areas of southern England were inundated for four months causing destruction of farmland and property. Droughts will also increase and farmers will have to adapt to use different crops more suited to these more extreme conditions.

When Mr Patterson makes statements like these he is guilty of cherry-picking the facts and misrepresenting the risks. Even within UK, he ignores the many disadvantages to UK of localised global warming. It’s not as if Mr Patterson is unaware of these risks. His own government department has analysed the likely impacts. (ref2)

On a global scale, he hugely misrepresents the situation. The 2.5 degrees he makes light of will play out very differently around the planet. Some Pacific Island countries may disappear altogether. Sub-Saharan countries, already poor, are facing a loss of 40% of their crop production. Some countries will face mass population movements to avoid famine. (ref3) The UK may be able to afford to mitigate and adapt to 2.5 degrees of warming but many countries do not have the wealth to do that even if it were possible.

If you hear that climate change brings advantages just ask yourself : Advantages for whom? where? and for how long?

Introduction to Philosophy

I went to Edinburgh University so this was kinda like going back there! I’ve read a bit about Western Philosophy but never studied it properly. This was interesting: Hume (Edinburgh’s own philosopher) and Kant and some others. But not sure if it persuaded me away from my view that philosophers really need to do some actual data-gathering rather than just sitting behind their desk and making theories up!

It was the first MOOC that I’d done. And I didn’t join in the discussion forum. I did skim the various posts but didn’t find them very helpful. Often the people posting seemed to be using them to show off. Hmm, I’m not beyond showing off myself so maybe I was just a bit too shy to join in with them!

Here’s one of the things we thought about …

It was six weeks. Half a dozen short videos each week. A weekly quiz. No project! My first certificate of accomplishment!

What are the considerations you deem most important when deciding which charity to donate to?

My donations are partly in responses to specific current needs and campaigns, eg UNICEFs work in Syria and the current Greenpeace campaign to stop oil drilling in the Arctic; and partly towards longer term work in areas like climate change that I am concerned about, eg RSPB, Oxfam, Scottish Green Party.

I do not give donations to Christian-based charities like CAFOD or Salvation Army because they hold views that I disagree with, eg Catholic charities working in Africa but not prepared to recommend contraception, or the use of condoms to prevent spread of AIDS. I do give donations to Buddhist-based charities (eg Karuna Trust, Green Tara Trust) because I’m familiar with their ethics and I know from personal experience that they work with those in need irrespective of their religion and without any ‘strings attached’ like trying to convert people to Buddhism.

Have you come across the Greater Good in Action people and their GGIA website? If not have a look at it. They’re based in Berkeley, California. And they specialise in in applying basic Buddhist techniques of mindfulness and compassion into a secular and science-supported format. That’s my description of them, anyway. I did an online course of theirs a year or so back. It was incredibly well-resourced, had lots of very good people communicating very good suggestions about cultivating mindfulness and compassion into our lives, and was backed up by very, very good science. You can do the course via

Here are some of the led meditations and reflections from their website that I particularly appreciate.

You’ve probably noticed when you’re trying to get someone to modify their opinion on some topic, that your best attempts frequently result in them having an even more entrenched opinion – despite your friendliest attempts to dissuade them and despite having given them well-authenticated reasons to change their mind. It all backfires and from your point of view anyway, the situation is now worse than before you began. Take heart. It’s not just you who ends up in this quagmire. Continue reading Worldview Backfire Effect & How to Debunk It→

I’ve been following the Science of Happiness MOOC run by UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Centre. There are currently over 66,000 people signed up for it. It runs as a self-paced course and it’s jam-packed with fascinating videos and talks. There are also quizzes for each topic and even two exams so it’s challenging too. You can just watch the videos without doing any of the quizzes or exams if you want to, so don’t let the word ‘exam’ put you off.